Difference in translation

Can we or should we be indifferent to the fact that this essay about the difference that translation makes is itself a kind of “free” translation? Dose it matter that, under a quite different title, the first version of these remarks was composed, presented, eventually revised, and published?

In this title, “measure” refers to the means or process by which we can perceive the action of different, the working of a principle of fragmentation, in translation. In the second place, “effects” shifts the stress away from program for strong translation toward a consideration of the results or consequences of translation.

Putting these two references together, the preposition “of” discreetly allows an alternative sense of measure, as a state of moderation, restraint, regulation, to come into play, just as the preposition “in” in “difference in translation”, allows difference to signify either the active principle in translation or the product of translation.

 

Here are some characteristics of English that serve to contrast with other language

(1) A strong tendency to favor actualization, this means “concrete occurrence in a context”; actualization is thus defined in opposition to “abstract notion”.

(2) A tendency to prefer direct or constative relations to the referent over commentary

A stone tendency to tighten the network of internal linkages that bind the elements of discourse together and thereby to prefer a strict, precise, homogeneous set of relations to the initiates it is surely all too obvious that translation, as concept and as a practice, falls within the larger framework of representation and mimesis, of analogy and metaphoricity.